Lygia Clark’s Many Twists and Turns, at MoMA

Slide Show | ‘The Abandonment of Art’ Photos from the new Lygia Clark show at the Museum of Modern Art.

Byron Smith for The New York Times

By ROBERTA SMITH

May 15, 2014

The Museum of Modern Art’s sprawling survey of the work of the influential Brazilian artist Lygia Clark has a singularly unpromising title: “Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988” signals something of a letdown, especially if you like art. But once you’ve worked your way through this up-and-down massing of some 300 works, equally fitting and less stark alternatives may come to mind, including “the expansion of art” and “the internalization of art.”

Because Clark (1920-88) didn’t so much abandon art as push it slowly, painstakingly and even logically — in small abstract paintings, wall pieces and flexible sculptures — to a place where objects and materials were meant to be handled and viewers became participants, alone or in groups. Clark devised a process she called “structuring of the self,” a kind of psycho-physical therapy or healing process that might also be called body work, and for some time in the late 1970s and ’80s, she practiced it on private clients before reversing her “abandonment” and turning back to art in the last years of her life.

One of the most fascinating of the participatory works is captured in a grainy video in the show’s final gallery, which is hung with masks, Hazmat-worthy body suits and the small, eccentric DIY objects that Clark devised for her participants (and later her clients), along with photographs of them in use. (My favorite is a plastic bag with a rubber band around its middle that contains water and a few handfuls of small shells, which I definitely want to try at home.) The video depicts “Anthropophagic Slobber,” which was first enacted in 1973 by Clark’s students at the Sorbonne, where she taught a course on “gestural communication” for several years. Once you’ve gotten past the “eeeee-YOU” factor of the description of this “sensorial proposition,” as Clark called it, it is both beautiful and rather brilliant.

So here goes: One person (sparsely clothed, the label says) lies down, and several others gather around, each with a spool of colored thread in the mouth. They proceed to pull out and “drizzle” the thread, wet with saliva, over the face and body of their prone collaborator, forming a fine and random web of different colors.

Although you may have to read the label to understand exactly where it’s coming from, the delicate, growing web of thread precipitated by the close circle of people is too eerie and suggestive and just plain intense not to watch for a while. It mesmerizes, suggesting some ancient rite, primitive and deep, whether of birth, baptism, initiation or burial. None of this rules out a sci-fi aspect: We could also be watching the cultivation of a second skin, a protective net or a complex wiring that the body will ultimately absorb to gain superhuman powers. (Spider-Man?)

And then, perhaps, we’re back at eee-you, the primordial intimacy of the thread’s mouth-to-body transfer, of the gentle forcing of the participants into a collective experience that only they can know fully. It seems bound to be charged and to provide valuable insight into human connection. How many people would participate with the promise of such insight? Who knows. But think about the speed with which you might perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a stranger or help one give birth — as recently happened on a New York sidewalk — and the kinds of bonds that emerge from such encounters.

“Facilitators” demonstrate Lygia Clark’s “Couple” (1969).

Byron Smith for The New York Times

For further insight, I recommend reading one of the show catalog’s 10 essays, in which the performance artist and professor Eleanora Fabião writes about her own participation in “Anthropophagic Slobber,” which will be “activated” by “facilitators,” in the words of the museum’s news release, at unannounced times.

This unusual, sometimes exhausting, sometimes irritating show — the first comprehensive survey of Clark in North America — has been organized by Luis Pérez-Oramas, the Modern’s curator of Latin American art, and Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and formerly the Modern’s chief curator of drawings. It is frequently a rather somber affair, in part because of a dearth of color. It almost looks as if MoMA is doing penance for the noisy abandon of the Isa Genzken retrospective in these sixth-floor galleries over the winter.

“Lygia Clark” introduces an artist, a thinker and (judging by her writings in the catalog) a complicated, regal, comfortably self-centered personality who does not fit easily into any art or professional category. Her early work has a dainty perfectionism but also a noticeable lack of sensuality. Later efforts can flop spectacularly and sloppily, even delusionally, as with the laughable installation piece “The House Is the Body: Penetration, Ovulation, Germination, Expulsion,” from 1968. Reverentially presented by itself on the fourth floor, it consists of four closetlike rooms; the visitor supposedly re-experiences the processes in the title. As if. “Penetration” is filled with white balloons, while “expulsion” involves yarn hanging from the ceiling and rubber balls on the floor.

Clark’s career has a forced-growth quality in which the journey is almost more impressive than any one stop along the way. It actually spans more years in art time than the length of her life, but at times she seems to stall in repetition, as if she couldn’t be bothered to develop her own ideas. The through line is an attraction to intimate scale and a kind of spiraling space in which inside and outside become one.

The show is laid out in four large galleries, each dense with a different kind of art, like a series of well-cultivated gardens. First comes painting. After a few capable representational preliminaries, in the early 1950s, she moves on to several varieties of geometric abstraction, often in beautiful colors that reach back to the Russian Constructivism of the late 1910s, as well as to Klee and Mondrian, the latter an artist she admired enough to address in an imaginary letter reprinted in the catalog: “You are more alive today for me than all the people who understand me, up to a point.” These works qualified her for membership in the self-consciously avant-garde Neo-Concrete group, which also included Hélio Oiticica, a younger painter and lifelong friend with similar interests in inactivity.

The paintings then become increasingly physical, and the incised lines begin to tilt diagonally, leading to a second gallery where a series of interlocking black-and-white compositions are investigated almost ad nauseam in works that are very much in tune with those of Josef Albers and Ellsworth Kelly. Soon, Clark is making similar works in metal, which enables them to be shaped and the black and white planes to angle outward, which finally takes Clark into real space.

Some of Lydia Clark's metal sculptures called “Bichos” (“Critters”).

Byron Smith for The New York Times

Clark had been talking about this for a while. In 1956, still a painter, she gave a lecture in which she discussed the importance of space much the way that Minimalists would a few years later.

The third gallery is dominated by her best-known works, the small metal sculptures charmingly named “Bichos” (“Critters”) and related efforts from 1960-63. Made of mostly cutout aluminum, their geometric planes are hinged together and bend into various arrangements — a form of post-Minimalism before the fact. Three copies are available for manipulation, which is fun. They resemble toys for visually oriented adults that could easily be sold in the Modern’s gift shop. So it is a little confusing to see from photographs in the catalog that Clark also considered some of them models for immense, generic public sculptures.

Not to be overlooked are two vitrines that step out of the chronological flow and contain some of the most satisfying works in the show: tiny structures made of matchboxes glued together in stacked configurations painted mostly bright red or blue. These compartmentalized structures, from 1964, when Clark was edging away from objects, could be plans for houses or furniture.

The final gallery comes as a relief, if only because the hard-edge angularity of much of the preceding work relents, giving way to soft malleable materials that predominate in the improvised objects frequently used in her therapeutic work. Involving balls, rubber gloves and masks, they often resemble refugees from Surrealism, but they mainly suggest that Clark had reached a side of sensibility that she did not live long enough to develop fully, in or out of art.

The catalog adds a lot to the show, but not enough. The essays, while interesting, tend to zero in on and fetishize aspects of Clark’s achievement, when someone needed to pull back and give a better sense of the woman and her life for the general reader. The chronology, usually a reliable overview of life and work, is largely a list of exhibitions in prose form. In the opening paragraph of Ms. Fabião’s essay, she mentions that Clark, who was born in Belo Horizonte, was a member of a rather well-off aristocratic family. This leaves us to wonder how family wealth affected her life, which included periods in Paris.

Luckily, the catalog includes examples of Clark’s writings and letters, which present a fairly full spectrum, from moments of narcissism (“I am feeling so good that when I wake up my body thanks me”) to New Age mumbo-jumbo to very astute appraisals of her work and that of artists like Albers and Jackson Pollock, whom she saw, rightly, as antecedents.

This exhibition is a lot easier to get through with Clark’s driving, mercurial, sometimes pioneering intelligence whispering in your ear.

“Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988” is on view through Aug. 24 at the Museum of Modern Art; 212-708-9400, moma.org.